CNN.com - Nervous PBS bleeps words in new drama - Jul 12, 2004
It's a sad state of affairs when even the network known for being high-brow can't muster up the cajones to tell the FCC to stick their draconian broadcast decency rules in their ... left ear.
At some point, someone is going to have to say that they're just WORDS. We were taught from a young age that words can't hurt you, but apparently, we're afraid that they can. It doesn't occur to Powell and the rest of the Commission that the more you hear it, the more it loses it's impact. They only shock you when they're so infrequent as to be shocking. That was the entire point that Trey Parker and Matt Stone made in the episode of South Park that was heavily advertised to include the word "shit", then proceeded to use it 162 times, according to a humorously placed counter on the screen.
Our nation is completely backward compared to more "enlightened" countries, in that we allow endless violence and fear mongering on air at all hours of the day, and a harmless nipple (even if it was from one of the Jackson clan) gets the nation in an outrage. Don't travel to Europe, then, or you'll see them on TV everyday! Even in commercials.
2 comments:
I disagree with your contention that certain words lose their impact the more you hear them. It really all depends who's saying them. If you hear your friend say the f-word, who cares? But if you boss tells you to f**k off and means it, that's a different story. Same thing with the n-word. If it's said by a black guy to another black guy, that's OK in some circles; if it's said by a white guy to black guy, that's virtually never OK.
Dead-on with the assertion that the U.S. is a fear and violence-mongering nation though.
silks
Good point, silks, but I think that is more of an issue of context, as opposed to repetition. Repetition, or lack thereof, can be a context, but it certainly isn't the only context. It doesn't have to even be a boss in your equation, it could be anyone that you wouldn't expect it from, like your Grandma.
Maybe it's a pipedream, but I'd like to see a nation where we are so tired of swear-words being overused, that we start expanding our vocabularies. We all need better words to express ourselves.
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